The Terror #wattys2017 #TNTHorrorContest

The Rock

     1971...it was the summer of drugs. We were high school dropouts, leftover hippies who had all but forgotten about peace and love. A small town nestled between the San Fernando Valley to the west, Burbank and Glendale to the south and up against the Angeles Crest Mountains behind. To the uninitiated, it was just a notch carved from the big Los Angeles tree, a rural area with Mom's and Pop's businesses and tiny single story bungalows, but to the resident's it was quite another thing.

         One of the oldest towns in Los Angeles county, it was incorporated in 1884 as a utopian paradise for its high elevation, great hunting, and fresh air. When my parents moved me there in 1970 it was still called "The Halls of Health," and was home to many an asthmatic and those wishing to escape the smog and filth of the big city.  There was no way my parents could have known, what sort of place they were moving us too. To them, it looked like a small quaint burg, ala Mayberry RFD and I'm quite certain they never had a clue what the place was about, but to me, it was to be the place of my becoming and my undoing. The cops call it "The Rock."

         There is a saying in town that says, "Everyone comes back," and it's proven true. There is an invisible barrier you pass through when entering the area, it's tangible, you can feel it. It's as if you have entered a place where time moves a little slower, where change does not follow the natural course like the rest of the world, and the folks here like it that way. It's always been a bit of a" Way back machine" and this is the way it wants to be.   After dark, the town takes on a slightly sinister, film noir vibe, vibrating through your soul, making you into that which it wants you to be, and you want to be one with it.

         The place from wince I came, was much different,  the styles and what was cool was completely at odds with what I had known.  This was one of the first lessons I learned when I began school at Mount Gleason Jr. High. The loud prints and bell bottom pants in Norwalk did not work here; this school was about white T-shirts, Levi Jeans and Engineer boots that God forbid, you did not polish. This was the outlaw biker influence, these were kids of those bikers or those influenced by them. That was a big part of Tujunga, it was run by  the Devil's Henchmen, who's dope ran through the streets like lava with the sounds of V-Twins echoing through the night. The town is physically located in the center of several large towns and is known for being a distribution center for everything from pot to heroin and everything in between. I had no perception of these kinds of things,  I came from surfers and groovy cuffed baggies, not that I fit in there either. Tujunga is a different kind of animal.

         How I stayed out of the pen and not dead has more to do with luck, a young girl who thought she loved me and my need to save her, but that's another story for another time, this story is about me, Merrill Graves and what was in my path on my way to becoming that which I have been. Prior to Sunland/Tujunga, we were pretty much like every other Ozzie and Harriet Los Angeles family. My two sisters , one 10 years older the other 7 years younger were born to Mr. and Mrs. Daniel J Graves, myself born in the year 1956. Pops was an iron worker, ship fitter and used car salesman, Moms was, "Rosey the riveter" during the depression, hailing from the Midwest. No one ever said it out loud... but there was no mistaking, my big sister Suzi was born six months after the wedding.

         I never knew my Moms to be anything but a stay at home housewife; like most women of her generation. The stability of that alone had a lot to do with my self-assurance when all about me were living in homes where working mothers were struggling for that legal tender. Once I began to disregard the wishes of my parents and dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, Moms kept me in cigarette money and a couple of bucks for coffee down at Al's restaurant.  My Pops was barely around, oh he was home of an evening, if unconscious in the recliner is the same as being home.  He had a heart attack before we moved to Tujunga and was forced to leave his job at the ship yards to become a used car dealer. He worked with (or for, I still don't know which)his best friend Mike, the Son of a bitch who was my molester from the age of seven, till I was twelve. At fifteen I hadn't yet figured that out but my Father calling him his best friend probably had something to do with my massive drug consumption and my deep-seated fear of sex.  This also kept me from taking advantage of all little stoner runaway chicks that I might have knocked up had I not had this fear...but that too is another story for another time.

This story is about my awakening and my becoming aware of my awareness.